The quality of multimedia streaming may be affected by several factors. One of them, for example, is the one-way delay of receiving the multimedia streams, whereby the delay for conversational audio/video applications and interactive applications may be less than 1 second, while the delay for non-interactive audio/video streaming applications may be less than 10 seconds.
Another example of a factor that affects the quality of multimedia streaming may be the synchronized presentation of multimedia streams. A human visual system may be tolerant to a small degree of skew in presenting audio and video streams, (e.g., less than 80 mseconds). Transporting audio and video streams over unreliable networks, such as wireless and the Internet, may introduce a variable delay in receiving audio and video packets. This delay variation may become significant if audio and video packets are sent over two different connections, as is the case for real-time transport protocol (RTP)/RTP control protocol (RTCP) streaming.
Lip synchronization may affect applications such as television (TV) video games and video conferencing applications. This may become a complex process if dealing with a multimedia presentation at two or more geographically distributed locations in a temporally synchronized manner, which is applicable to social multimedia streaming, (i.e., multi-device synchronization).